It is common in sawmills to process a large number of individual boards of selected sizes for further sorting, turning, cutting or planning. Most of the times, the boards emerge from the mill in random order and must be presented separately and individually for proper processing (e.g. end trimmer or bin sorter). Therefore, there are different types of automatic devices that exist for loading, transferring and stacking boards. Examples of such devices are described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,869,360; U.S. Pat. No. 5,921,376; U.S. Pat. No. 5,353,272; U.S. Pat. No. 6,048,164; U.S. Pat. No. 6,238,174; U.S. Pat. No. 6,431,343; and U.S. Pat. No. 6,446,485.
Although useful, the devices known in the art do not address all the needs of the wood cutting industry. For improving their productivity, sawmills require faster devices that are versatile enough to operate at variable speeds, capable of varying the distance between the spaced apart boards, and also capable of spacing boards of different thickness and length. Furthermore, safety of some of those devices is a problematic as they can pitch boards in the air thereby posing serious risks to surrounding workers and equipment.
Therefore, it would be desirable to be provided with an apparatus for spacing boards that is automatic, that can operate at high speed, and that can be feed with boards of different thickness and length.
Features of the invention will be apparent from review of the disclosure, drawings and description of the invention below.